Driver 21 - I never thought I would show the world this.
This is the first time I ever saw myself on video, right at the start of my transition.
There is a reason this video is called Driver 21.
That name ties back to something most people from my past would recognise, although they would never have known the details. When I came out, nobody had a clue. Nobody knew. I had been the most covert, sneaky, accomplished hider of what I was. I had been doing it for so many years that secrecy had become second nature.
As a child, I hid things in the attic under insulation. I hid things in jigsaw boxes. At university, when I lived with my girlfriend, I took apart kitchen cabinets so I could hide girl things inside them. I had systems. I had escape routes. I had cover stories. I had a whole private architecture of concealment.
When everything became digital, the hiding became digital too.
On my PC, I had written a little code file. If I clicked it, it would search for anything connected to me as a woman, images, videos, anything, and turn them into innocuous-looking Windows system files. Then I had another little file I could click to turn them all back again.
No one would ever have found them.
Even if I had died, no one would have known.
Driver 21 looked like a system file. If anyone had seen it, they would have walked straight past it.
But this particular file mattered.
I had only returned to seeing Stevie maybe six weeks earlier. I had a cheap blonde wig, terrible makeup, and I was mostly still wearing my man clothes. I think it was just a black jumper and my normal jeans.
But I was happy.
You can see it in the video. I am sitting in a chair, dancing. It took me a long time to get the courage to press record. I had never seen myself on video before. In fact, it had only been about eight days since I had ever seen a photograph of myself. I had never had the courage to take one, because I was terrified I would look terrible.
This was the first time I ever saw myself moving.
At the very end, I point at the camera and say:
“If I look horrific now, I’m going to be so depressed. I am so happy. I cannot say how happy I am.”
Then I press stop.
I have kept that video ever since. I have probably watched it five hundred times. I used to drive around with it playing on loop in the car. I was fascinated by her. By me. By the fact that she existed at all.
There is one more detail.
In the background of the video, there is a ladder in my office. That office was in a separate building from the house, and I used to keep girl things hidden in the attic above it. I had even removed the battery from the smoke alarm hatch and left the ladder there, so that if anybody ever asked why there was a ladder in the room, I could say it was for changing the smoke alarm battery.
That is how I lived.
A ridiculous, intricate, duplicitous, covert lie.
And then, for twenty-one seconds, I sat in a chair in a cheap blonde wig and terrible makeup, dancing because I was so happy I could barely contain it.